This is an interesting story from Washington State.

Pierce County is slated to strike 230 names from its voter rolls this week as it wraps up an investigation of voter-registration fraud.

The investigation centered on registrations submitted by employees of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, a national advocacy group for low-income people. ACORN workers submitted more than 1,800 registration forms in King County and about 1,400 in Pierce County in fall 2006.

Last summer, King County prosecutors charged seven ACORN employees with submitting false information on voter-registration cards. Five of the seven have since pleaded guilty. Two ACORN employees admitted falsifying registrations in Pierce County. Pierce County Auditor Pat McCarthy said her staff became suspicious when they noticed a large number of the registrations came from voters who supposedly lived at the Tacoma Rescue Mission, a group that provides food, shelter and other services to the homeless.

Prosecutors believe ACORN workers were not scheming to permit illegal voting, but rather trying to get paid for work they didn’t do. ACORN workers, who earned $8 an hour, flipped through phone books or made names up when they fell short of quotas they were supposed to meet, said Allen Rose, a Pierce County deputy prosecutor. In a few cases, the workers appeared to have used the names of celebrities. Pierce County received registrations for “Veronica Mars,” a character in the television series of the same name, and “Pat Tillman,” a football player who left the NFL to become an Army Ranger and died in Afghanistan in 2004.

No ballots from the fraudulent registrations were cast.

The Indianapolis Star reports today that

The Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles could revoke driver’s licenses for as many as 56,000 people later this month after a database check showed discrepancies in some of their information.

The state also will send notices warning of a similar revocation to about 35,000 people with identification cards. But the actual totals probably will be smaller in both cases. “We think that’s the upper limit,” BMV spokesman Dennis Rosebrough said Friday.

The BMV started a verification project in November that involved matching its records with a Social Security Administration database. It checked more than 6 million records and found 206,000 cases where its data didn’t match the Social Security information. The agency then started sending letters to those people warning them that their identification cards or licenses could be revoked. About 82,000 people verified their information, and another 33,000 cases were resolved because of reasons like the drivers moving or a license expiring.

Mismatches were created by typos or people getting married and changing their last names. “The great majority of the mismatches that occurred were what we would call innocent or inadvertent kinds of things,” Rosebrough said.

Given that we wrote a report for the IBM Center for the Business of Government on database interoperability and one of the key issues in that report is the topic of database structure and matching, we are shocked (shocked!) that there would be problems with such matches.

Weekend America broadcast this great song, Super Tuesday — by Hearts of Palm UK, this weekend.

Go to the Weekend America page for the song.

Or just read the lyrics:

Elections for party nominations
To represent our nation
Who you gonna vote for?
You know it’s Super Tuesday!
Super Tuesday!
Coming soon to a state near you

In Alabama and Idaho
Georgia and Delaware
Utah and Tennessee
New York, New Mexico too
And Oklahoma, North Dakota
West Virginia, Minnesota

Obama has got a certain “je ne sais quoi”
But I’ve seen him on a few too many TV talk shows
Is Bill running vicariously through Hillary?
And I just found out about Mike Gravel

Elections for party nominations
To represent our nation
Who you gonna vote for?
You know it’s Super Tuesday!
Super Tuesday!
Coming soon to a state near you

In Arizona and Illinois,
Kansas, Montana, California
Connecticut, Alaska and Arkansas too
and Colorado, New jersey, Missouri and Massachusetts

Giuliani couldn’t stand the heat and so he dropped out
Mike Huckabee has got that righteous Christian act down pat
Mitt Romney seems to change positions like the wind
John McCain is really old so this is his last chance

Globalization is changing the world
And no one knows quite what to do about it
The dollar’s not what it once was
And so everything costs more

There’s a seething war in Iraq
Is it time to bring our troops home?
Privatize social security,
Or equal taxes for all?

Elections for party nominations
To represent our nation
Who you gonna vote for?
You know it’s Super Tuesday!
Super duper Tuesday!
Coming soon to a state near you

Super Tuesday!
Super duper Tuesday!
Coming soon to a state near you.

This is from a story on stateline.org, “Independent Voters May Be Vexed At Polls”:

In delegate-rich California, it was state political parties – not state lawmakers – that set the rules for how “decline-to-state,” or independent, voters can participate.

“This is the first time such a system is being used in California,” said Conny McCormack, former registrar of voters and the county clerk for Los Angeles County. She said she feared some voters might be confused by the arrangement. Nearly 3 million voters, or 19 percent of California’s electorate, are registered as independents, she said. At stake are 441 delegates for the Democrats and 173 for the GOP.

California decided in 2000 that “unaffiliated” or “decline-to-state” voters could participate in primary elections if the parties allowed it. While the California Democratic Party opted to let “declare-to-state” voters participate in its primary, state GOP leaders in a controversial decision decided to bar independents from their presidential primary.

…

Independent California voters must be careful to ask for a Democratic ballot. Otherwise they automatically will be given a nonpartisan slate, allowing them to vote only for nonpartisan offices and ballot measures.

So my Tennessee prediction was off by more than 50,000 votes. Amazing climb in early voting over the past three days. It went straight up! If only this was the stock market…

My best guess would have to be excitement after Florida. I wonder again at the party breakdowns. Any reporters out there?

Final graphs here and final tabulation here.

From Molly Reynolds at Brookings, from her home county in PA:

I voted by absentee ballot (or received a ballot but did not use it). May I vote in person?
Yes. In fact, the Election Code provides that unless you are 65 years of age or older, you must vote in person if possible. At the polling place, the Judge of Election will note on the appropriate form that you appeared to vote in person, and you will sign in and vote as if you had not requested and submitted an absentee ballot. When the absentee ballots are counted at the Board of Elections office after the polls close, your unopened absentee ballot will be marked VOID and will not be counted. Should you encounter any difficulty at the polls on election day, urge the official to contact the Office of Election Services at 610-559-3055. Note: Voters age 65 or older are permitted by law to submit an “alternative ballot” if their polling place is not handicapped accessible. These voters may also go to the polls to cast their ballots.

Rick Hasen alerted readers to a court ruling in New Jersey allowing absentee voters to re-vote if their candidate has dropped out of the race.

I haven’t seen the decision, but have a few comments:

1. The wording of the story is odd. A voter can re-vote “if their candidate has dropped out…” I learned, in the last six months, that the privacy of the ballot can be violated in North Carolina–they track absentee ballots just in case accusations of fraud arise–but if NJ doesn’t have such a system, how can we prove that “their candidate” has dropped out? I suspect that anyone can vote again, if they ask.
2. This is not unprecedented. While I cannot cite the state, I was at an NCSL conference recently where a state legislator told us that, in his state, citizens can vote a second time at the precinct on election day, even if they have cast an early vote.
3. Tova Wang expressed concerns about absentee voting in a recent commentary, in part for this reason, and Adam Nagourney quotes me expressing the same concerns for Florida voters. Is a “voter regret” system one way to handle a dynamic race like a presidential primary?

(I’d appreciate an email to paul.gronke at gmail.com if someone knows of the state or states that allow “regret” voting and how they handle it administratively.)

A former student of mine read my recent post on the potential issues facing “decline-to-state” voters in California’s primary next week. He pointed out another potential problem these voters might face:

I noticed your post about decline-to-state voters needing to request Democratic ballots, and thought you might be interested in some LA-specific issues. In LA county (and maybe others depeding on their equipment), all decline-to-state voters get the same Inkavote card ballot (the grid-o-bubbles), but they pick which party race they are voting in (Democratic vs. AI) by going into the party booth and marking the party at the top of the ballot. If the voter forgets to do this (as a fair number did in a recount I attended), then the ballot is invalid.

I attached the relevant page from the Democratic and AI sample ballot. The relevant bubbles are 5 and 6.

The sample ballots he sent along are here for the Democrats and for the American Independents.

Thanks for the tip, we’ll look out for this on election day and in the post-election canvass.

Two more days to go and Tennessee’s early voting numbers continue their climb. I think my estimate of 250,000 looks to be a good call.

If only I could call the Super Bowl so well.

The University of Michigan recently published an online symposium on proposals for electoral college reform. The link above takes you to Dan Tokaji”s paper and all of the other papers can be linked to from that page.